Few people believe the media’s account of happenings,
and still fewer have any trust in its impartiality

On
August 15, I had an opportunity to hear two veteran socialists—Mahatma
Gandhi’s disciple Nirmal Deshpande, and Surendra Mohan. Among many other
important things they said was the complaint that if somebody was doing
good, media would invariably ignore it. However, the media would never
lose an opportunity to overplay an evil, they pointed out. Media persons
squirmed in discomfort to hear all this, but they had nothing to refute it
with.

This is a general complaint. Most people, especially those who are not
very rich and powerful, feel that mainstream media is not impartial, that
it is too much preoccupied with trivia, that it is primarily interested in
ad revenues to the detriment of vital issues concerning common people’s
well-being. Matters are not helped when some newspaper tycoons declare
brazenly that what they are selling is merely a commercial
"product," and they do not necessarily have to be restrained by
any "values", other than commercial, in the pursuit of huge
profits.
That, in short, means an ever-increasing content of trivia, of extensive
use of visuals of scantily clad women on one pretext or the other, and
titillation, sensation, slander. Anything that boosts sales and ad
revenues. No holds barred. But the question is: if media is only an
ordinary business, why does it have the constitutional protection and
social sanctity of the Fourth Estate? Why does it have the moral authority
that is comparable to the authority of the legislature, judiciary and the
executive?

The most interesting part of all this is that the same media tycoons would
refuse to be treated like just any other businessman and demand the
respect reserved for the Fourth Estate. In short, they want to keep their
privileges without any regard for the special responsibilities. They want
the best of both the worlds, which has created a general distrust among
common people for the media, media persons and media moguls.
It has to be kept in mind that what we are talking about here refers to
the mainstream publications, TV channels and radio, not the organs of
political parties or publications of special interest groups. Readers’,
viewers’ and listeners’ expectations from the mainstream media are
quite different from those of special interest publications. In case of
say, Organiser or Radiance (or Nation, Milli Gazette and Muslim India),
the reader knows that these publications are meant only for special
segments of society, and don’t insist on the publication of the entire
spectrum of public opinion in them. However, they naturally expect the big
dailies, weeklies, important TV channels and radio to be more inclusive.
Sadly, most of the time, expectations are belied as these media outfits
too carry only a limited range of officially sanctioned views.

Most newspapers and magazines don’t allow a fair debate, and the TV
channels brazenly announce a commercial break whenever a guest ventures
with views beyond the narrow range of officially sanctioned opinion. Noam
Chomsky says that the views claimed by American media as common American
views are not subscribed to by even five percent of the people in that
country. The media’s views are the views of the political, military and
business establishments, exclusively. The situation in India is not very
different.

In India nobody has seriously tried to examine what level of credibility
the media enjoys with people in general and how are the different
publications, TV channels and radio stations rated in terms of their
credibility. It is an indicator of the Sarkari Akashwani’s low
credibility that far more people believe the foreign BBC radio than this
desi radio. Similarly, more people believe Star TV than the Sarkari
Doordarshan. Zee and Aaj Tak have done nothing to earn viewers’ trust.

William A Hachten in his highly interesting book Troubles of Journalism: A
Ciritical Look at What is Right and Wrong With the Press (Lawrence
Erlbaum, New Jersey, 1998) says that people are skeptical of their
political leaders’ credibility, and journalists too are in the same
class in terms of their low credibility. Journalists are seen as being
arrogant, corrupt and dishonest.

As for the complaint of the two Gandhians with which we began this piece,
it is interesting to note that such complaints are not limited to India
alone. Hachten quotes from KL Walsh’s Feeding the Beast (Random House,
New York, 1996):

"Of course, the press has to report such stories but they have taken
their toll. The media are no longer seen as society’s truth-sayers. By
embellishing the bad and filtering out the good, a negative picture
emerges. It is understandable that Americans have come to associate the
press with everything that has gone wrong."

The time is not far when Indians too would start doing that—associating
the press with everything that has gone wrong. q